Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

a_hanso (1891616) writes "Hard drives that combine a traditional spinning platter for mass storage and solid state flash memory for frequently accessed data, have always made sense. They may be slower than SSDs, but they are a lot cheaper gigabyte-for-gigabyte. CNET's Harry McCracken speculates on how soon such drives may become mainstream."

Yes, they are finally starting to get to the point they make sense. No, they have NOT "always" made sense.

You are trading performance for reliability. By putting the least use-tolerant component (the SSD) in the most-frequently-used position, you are aggravating the weak reliability issue.

Sure, that makes sense from a performance standpoint. But it is only just now that reliability (i.e., number of reliable write-cycles) is getting up to the point where they are even acceptable in that role, in a heav